Nice!

[BLACKBERREST3]

Going alright so far. I think I might be onto a systematic way to beat it every time with 96. Almost takes as much irl time pausing, planning, and giving orders than it does running autopilot with 6. setup is simple since there is no time to make a 20kw grid, everything gets its own circuit with 3 wheels. to save space, my research rooms double as skill scrubbers on the same grid. I'm not being entirely efficient with spacing, but it hasn't hurt me yet. Oxidizers spaced a bit apart with non-airflow tiles help keep the mealwood safe and pressurized. Dupes can hold their breath to work away from base so they can suck oxygen elsewhere. Every pocket of water must be kept where it is so it doesn't stray too far from base, can't funnel it down like normal.

[BLACKBERREST3]

just barely didn't make it. Seems the best bet is to have them pre skilled for grilling, and all types of digging like how I did it before with 100. No time for skill scrubbing it seems.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I’m gonna try skipping grilling until I get skill points naturally and see if I can speed up mealwood and o2 production asap. I think it’s still possible with only superhard diggers. I still want to use the 14x12 layout so I don’t have to rebuild later. Water wasn’t an issue yet as I still had plenty for food. Plus, if I could dig into the frozen or sulfur biomes, there is more food and oxygen there as well in the form of sleet wheat, grubfruit, and oxylite.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I always end up in this position. It all boils down to skill points, making more mush bar factories till i get more mealwood, and o2 production. I think I'll put a small algae farm on the bottom to handle co2. I'm 2/3 of the way there to skill points.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I have an idea to prevent slowdown and promote constant expansion. Tried all airflow tiles and algae farms and even though I went all in on o2 it wasn't enough which means that the glitch for holding their breath is still alive and I'm going to take full advantage of it. This time every floor will be it's own complete module with a wheel, deoxidizer, battery, and whatever I need for that floor. This should allow me to expand without wasting space or slowing down. I'll wait until I'm done trial and error to expand on what I've noticed with 96 dupes vs normal.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Looks promising

[BLACKBERREST3]

Well, I tried. it looks like specialization is required. My dupes are just too slow overall to get anything done past round 6. I have plenty of water and o2 but kitchen menace trait did them in, they took way too long to make mush bars. Looks like this type of challenge is more of a one off since you end up with dupes with one job. I can systematically get to this point every time it seems. Back to what worked before. Since 200 dupes has been done before, might as well see what happens with 384 dupes all with one job each.

some notes; that was the cleanest start I've ever gotten with probably one of the worst seeds. There wasn't too much water and there was so few mealwood seeds scattered around.

[MinhPham]

Maybe try to expand horizontally instead, they should run faster than climbing ladders.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Or not, my pc can't run it 😭

Might as well see how efficient a 96 specialized run can be.

11 minutes ago, MinhPham said:

Maybe try to expand horizontally instead, they should run faster than climbing ladders.

Problem is they need to start with hard digging skill and I had started them all with super hard digging that run. I think I've collected enough info to know that they need to start with certain skills to speed up the process. I think I'll try a mix of grillers, ranchers, hard diggers, and super hard diggers this run to bum rush ranching and space.

Also looks like I have to replace kitchen menace with unpracticed artist. might as make it for all dupes so I don't have to worry about who has how much morale.

[MinhPham]

Long play or 100 days challenge ? For 100 days i don't see the purpose of ranching, maybe mushroom or bristle blossom can be your best food.

(Never mind their seed count is very limited)

Edited Saturday at 05:41 PM by MinhPham

[BLACKBERREST3]

It almost seems like grilling is a trap. I'm just gonna do 24x each of hard/superhard digging, supplying, and ranchers. Grilling just takes too long when I already have enough water. I don't want them to be too overpowered so they all have the same traits and interests starting at +1 with the only difference being pre-learned skills.

18 minutes ago, MinhPham said:

Long play or 100 days challenge ? For 100 days i don't see the purpose of ranching, maybe mushroom or bristle blossom can be your best food.

(Never mind their seed count is very limited)

I didn't exactly have a goal in mind, but then I had thought from doing it the lazy way was that I could find a method that applied to every possible seed with as little micromanaging as possible. Certain "mechanics" appear when you have a lot of dupes. Mainly lag that prevents them from moving sometimes. Opening consumeables menus also takes a while so I should just never open them. Also, if you have deoxidizers every floor, the c02 naturally gets pushed out even without mesh tiles. I couldn't explore very far or keep mealwood alive without spamming those.

I thought about using other seeds, but bristle blossom is too few like you said and mushrooms I'd have to put at the bottom, but I'd rather put a barrier of algae terrariums to scrub the co2 instead. The next best seed is grubfruit in the sulfur biome and I might be able to ranch sweetles too. If my diggers are fast enough, I might do mushrooms too.

Forgot supplying wasn't the one of the starting skills

Edited Saturday at 05:57 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

Now I've got the right strats. Just be better, faster, stronger XD. I shaved off a few days and immediately researched and planted every mealwood seed. Using least action principle, I was able to only build and research what was absolutely necessary while digging everything else. Dupes were never slow this time around. Can't stop to build floors or other things. I don't see a reason to dig into the slime biomes or frozen biomes yet, I think I'll just funnel the water and build a mush plant since I have time now. building floors is what wasted my time last session. I don't think it's worth digging for the sulfur biome since you get so few grubfruit seeds. I'll have to create short vids for every movement technique, but it's mostly just the basics. Leave 2 wall buffer for water tanks so you can dig the inside for items or support, don't build mesh or airflow since that gets rid of the breath exploit and prevents pressurizing the area. The rule for expansion (at least how I designed my rooms and spacing) is to build at least 1 oxidizer every vertical layer and at least 1 every other layer horizontally. Dig first for seeds -> Setup alternate intermediate food (mush bars) -> holdout to cycle 6 and skill up dupes. The smart play would be to start with 95 dupes and print one on cycle 3 to get a skill point early and destress buff, but I didn't think about that this run. I don't think I'll need the printer pod at all so I'm not going to use it this time. This seed was a little bit more forgiving on mealwood seeds, but since I was able to dig so fast this time around, I'll try again on a few more world seeds to get the average mealwood/muckroot per world. I'd like to do even more dupes, but my laptop absolutely cannot handle it. I think deoxidizer strat might be quicker than spoms.

[MinhPham]

1 hour ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

 I think deoxidizer strat might be quicker than spoms.

It is far better than hydra spom when you can ranch lumb for algae because you can also submerge in 2 liquid layers to prevent it from over pressure, otherwise you will run out of algae pretty fast when you need over 10kg/s of algae to support 96 dupes.

By the way, hydra spom can be made very easy, very early .... in the video i didn't notice a hydrogen gas tile didn't go up before i seal the room so i even had to spend some time dealing with it, best way is just wait for it to go up.

 

Edited Sunday at 06:34 AM by MinhPham

[BLACKBERREST3]

I'm still going to use spom, but I have all this algae and I might as well use it up. The hope is to supplement oxidizers with spom after I have hatch ranches set up. Accidentally let the game run on autopilot I'll have to roll back a cycle. I'm food positive though, but I've also slowed down tremendously because dupes take time to make all that mush. I also had them build floors while I was waiting for skills.

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

Learned something new. Dupes at 0kcal with an eating task don't die.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Going to try a slightly different strat. It's always those mush bars that take forever and slow everything down. I really need to cut back on dupe interactions so they have time for everything else. I'll see if I can't do algae terrarium only. I'm going to leave double spaces this time for future fire pole as well. Every little bit counts.

Average mealwood for that seed was about 140-160.It probably multiplied a bit towards the end.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I knew it would happen, but had to see anyway. algae terrariums need some time to build up PW bottles so it can pressurize quicker. I'll make 3 dupes spin up deoxidizers for the mealwood and try to use terrariums for everything else. hopefully the extra gap for fire poles doesn't diminish pressure from the mealwood. Dupes can explore quite a bit sharing the first deoxidizer. hard to strike a balance with pressure and non-pressurized areas. I'll have to rethink spacing here to maximize exploration distance. To recap from my observations, it looks like an area becomes pressurized extending 1 area over horizontally when using deoxidizers. If I replace any of the floors with mesh, I lose all pressure for that area as dupes will suck it up too quickly between levels and mealwood would end up dying on that level. I think I'll try to funnel the mealwood towards the 3 center columns with deoxidizers spaced evenly on every vertical level of the center column. I'll put algae terrariums to the left and right of the 1st and 3rd column to hopefully extend the area over time and the hope is it eventually replaces my O2 supply entirely with 0 dupe interaction. The benefits should include no downtime for setting up and research (like spom needs). Liquid reservoir is tier 2 research so I can drain PW into those for easy PO2 later. For an area to be explorable it needs to either be pressurized which wastes a ton of resources unnecessarily or it needs to have a gradual O2/PO2 source like PW or algae terrariums. If I have this correct, I should be able to conserve all my algae for mealwood only. To further limit dupe interaction, I think If I place coal generators around algae terrariums then co2 and heat won't be an issue anymore and it won't take away as much time from dupes. So even though I was going positive in food production last session, the main killer was running out of resources as I was barely going food positive. It would really help to have +10 cooking dupes if this were any other 100 dupe run, but I know it can be done with all +1 dupes. To speed up mush bar production, the only other thing I can do is provide power so they are on 24/7 and my dupes will have time for building/ranching instead of running on wheels all day.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Also another note, to prevent dupes from forming liquid locks by peeing in the research rooms I noticed it was better to build rooms with double pneumatic doors instead of 1 door and 2 tiles.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Maybe every seed isn't possible with this method. This might just be one of the worst layouts for the starting area for the modular design. Also, there was only 70 mealwood seeds this time around. I did change one thing and that was I had rushed washrooms early. It didn't take too much time to do so I figured it might make their pathing faster the less mess they made. lowest kcal rn is 1370 so they have a day to get more mush bars down, but I'll be back to the same slow down as before. I'll try the next few cycles tomorrow, but  I predict that dupes just aren't fast enough on 0 cooking for mush.

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

Progress. It looks like you can't slouch on logistics. Rushing Latrines was the play, not as much slow down. I've also been able to get fire poles down too. Just barely staving hunger. Also got the hatch ranch up and running too. To avoid micromanaging, everyone spent their skills on research and I have a method for food production and projects simultaneously. Set mush to priority 4 and at times of food surplus, plan the next project at higher priority. I've got plenty of water for mush and terrariums and I can always sieve the pockets around. They are still slow on mush, but I might be able to pass the food barrier this time.

Also replaced the oxidizers with terrariums and emptied the natural water tanks in the floors below it.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Algae terrariums to keep areas barely explorable and oxidizers for mealwood, it works. I think the next step would be to setup a 20kw power line for coal gens so I can keep the mush going without wheels. If I put the gens at the bottom, I don't have to worry about temps since all the hot co2 will be destroyed by the terrariums. If I can multiply my hatches and mealwood, I'm home free. I could try pacu ranching at some point since they are normally close by in the next biome over usually for all world seeds, but that also means I would have to give my ranching dupes swimming and my water tank would have to double as the ranch. I think practice and iteration is pretty much all you need. The trick is to be as fast as humanly possible setting up latrines, mealwood, and algae terrariums on the outskirts away from pressurized areas. I'm tempted to break into the cold biome for free water and food, but I know that other seeds may not have those biomes close by, so I don't want to use it yet. I know I wasn't as fast as I could have been on some parts so I might reset the seed now that I know what kind of modules I want to build. These modules should be universal on any normal seed I play on. I think instead of siphoning all the PW into reservoirs, I should just sieve them and use them in terrariums since they end up as bottles anyways and the benefit is I can provide the lowest amount of constant oxygen in those areas.

For the next session on the same seed, I'm going to be faster on getting the water tanks to the lower floors, setting up terrariums immediately (had set up too many deoxidizers initially), and now that I know the right layouts to use, The center column (starting on printing pod) should have deoxidizers on 4 rows (depending on map seed which 4 rows)

and those 4 row extending to three columns [NO MESH TILES]  should be used for mealwood only. I made the mistake of putting latrines on the same level as mealwood was supposed to be. I'm going to say that the ratio of latrines should be 1 latrine per 8-12 duplicants. So far no messes with 10 latrines and 96 dupe and no scheduling needed. I think setting up cots would be nice to further speed them up, but that is a huge space sink and should only be done when the space has been explored naturally. After this seed, I'll try another to see how much mealwood I get, the range so far is 70-140.

nvm, my save didn't go that far back, time for a new seed.

Usual start

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

Now is as good of time as any to start documenting each phase. Initial phase usually involves rapid expansion by maximizing surface area of tasks. leave no dupes idle and no buried item unturned. Researching planter boxes, algae terrariums, and then onto latrines. I don't think latrines are fast enough by cycle 2 before the great flood, but it does help with damage mitigation and they are pretty fast moppers regardless. Always put the liquid pump near the top middleish part of the tank so you don't have to worry about filtering PW for a while. Anywhere there is sandstone, go towards it for those mealwood/hatch/muckroot spots and starting water. I only build out of sandstone whenever possible for temperature reasons. And only igneous for thermal insulation tiles. I think the four rows of deoxidizers should go as low as possible to help expand while research is underway for terrariums and if that is not possible than any 4 rows centered on the printer pod will do.

And all at the same time work on getting under the natural tanks of water to try and consolidate it all into one tank if possible. If they are too far apart, slap a pitcher pump on it and when it dries up, reclaim that space later. Avoid digging into chlorine/hydrogen biomes for now unless you need the space. Slime biomes are okay to dig into, but try not to make a mess or mix up your clean water supply just yet.

Forgot to mention to immediately deconstruct the ration box at the start and replace it with an oxidizer, wheel, and battery

Also, don't dig the oxylite.

The manmade tiles should be on sand or other gravity based tiles and item spots.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I'm gonna restart and see if moving terrariums and deoxidizers 1 tile further apart is better for future designs. They end up leaving a one tile gap between pneumatic doors for other modules where they should have a two tile gap since most buildings are two tiles wide.

Printer pods messing up the Modularity, maybe I can get away with only two wheels instead of three.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Everything seems to be the right pressure rn. Considerably lowered my algae usage by spamming terrariums early. You do need 3 wheels going early game for the deoxidizers. there were times of low pressure, but it eventually pressurized again. to make it look nice, I'll replace two center mealwood above/below the printer with a hamster wheel next world seed. This world seed had 90-100 mealwood. Average so far is around 100 mealwood per world. I've fully dug out the starting biome, I have ranch rooms ready to go, my mush factories are set up all before cycle 6, and I have all the prereq research for fire poles already. Idle dupes means I should build another mush factory. I think I've gotten faster and my logistics have improved just from all the practice of restarting 100 times. I'm starting to think 200 dupes are possible again without pacu. To get 200 dupes food, I'd have to double the lavatories and mush factories so it would be even more cramped on space early game. 200 dupes might be seed dependent since you could have an easier time by getting above average mealwood seeds off rip.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Hmmmmm, so if fire poles are significantly faster, than why doesn't building tiles early help with speed overall...I'm wondering if the +25% speedup from tiles also affect the tile in front of it too. That would explain why it's not that much faster to build tile over natural tiles. If that's the case, than the pattern would have to be every other tile. I'll need to observe that more, but it looks like it's instantaneous speedup and slowdown from tile to natural so I'm not too sure.

wow, found this gem.

OH! duh, the reason why tile bonus doesn't matter is because it's multiplied to athletics bonus. all my dupes are at 0 athletics on start XD

Another post I don't remember posting in...😵